Students often ask me to explain the “one or two tricks that I absolutely need” to write well.
If I could distill the lessons of writing into one trick, I would say: Be simple and direct. Tell the reader who does what … again and again.
But writing is obviously more complex than that. So allow me to present ten essential skills for writing mechanics.
1. Write Great Sentences, Always.
Someone once asked Ernest Hemingway what he does when he gets writer’s block. His answer: I write one true sentence. However long it takes, Hemingway said, he struggles to get just the right words to express a thought. He thinks about who or what he’s writing about—the subject. He asks himself what they’re doing—the action. And he considers who or what this action is acting upon—the object.
Here’s how Hemingway’s character explains the process in his A Moveable Feast:
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
Once you write “one true sentence,” it’s easier to write another sentence … then another … then another. Before long, you’re writing paragraphs, then pages. No more writer’s block.
So how do you write one true sentence? I just told you. Write a subject … then a verb … then an object.
Nothing else matters unless you write great sentences. If you can write great sentences, over and over, you will become a good writer. If you can’t, forget it.
Too many writing teachers fail to teach their students how to write good sentences. They get so caught up with the five-paragraph structure and “compare and contrast” and quotations that they don’t explain how to build a great sentence.
Even professional writers create vague, meandering, inexact, and boring sentences. Focus on writing simple, sturdy sentences. You can write some elaborate sentences, too. But first, write simple and “true” sentences. Then you can do anything as a writer.
2. Use Simple Words.
In order to facilitate the cognitive process and to eradicate any potentiality of miscommunication, it is imperative that each and every writer employ solely the most efficacious and uncompounded locutions in each and every one of his or her compositions.
Got it? No? Let’s try again.
Use simple words to prevent misunderstandings. The mortal enemy of good writing is pretension. Teachers, students, politicians, CEOs, op-ed writers all have egos. They want to sound “smart.” So they use big words to convey the vastness of their vocabularies.
But remember this: Never write to show off your vocabulary. Write to convey ideas—period.
Always look for the smallest, simplest word to convey ideas. That doesn’t mean using a steady parade of monosyllabic words. You need to find the word that bests expresses your ideas, whether they’re short or long. So use a long word if it’s the best word. But always err on the side of short words.
3. State and Develop Only One Idea Per Paragraph.
The great thing about writing is that it’s a creative process. You discover ideas as you write. Sometimes you discover ideas that you didn’t even know you had. As you consciously write about a topic, the subconscious feeds all kinds of surprising ideas.
That’s also the difficult thing about writing. Let me explain.
If the sentence is the most important unit of writing—and it is, as we see in Commandment 3—then the paragraph is the second most important unit. And the amazing creativity of writers can make for some awful paragraphs.
When you write, one idea sparks another … then another … then another.
But if you express every idea, as they occur to you, you will never develop the first idea—the one you intended to discuss in the first place. So your paragraphs become collections of undeveloped ideas.
I like to think of paragraphs as “idea buckets.” State and develop one idea in every paragraph. Put one thing in every bucket. Don’t ever develop more than one thought in a paragraph.
Every time you write, label every idea—in bold face type or with marginal notes. Whenever you see two or more ideas in a paragraph, break up the paragraph into as many pieces.
You’ll notice that you never developed the ideas you stated. So go back, develop every idea—complete every paragraph. Then end the paragraph, and get to work on the next idea of the next paragraph.
As it says on the shampoo bottle: Rinse, repeat.
4. Break Down Complex Ideas Into Chunks.
Sometimes, you have no choice but to use complex words. The world, after all, is a complex place. You want to be simple, not simplistic.
When you describe complex ideas—the M-C-M sequence in market exchange, the controversies surrounding global warming, the sequence of actions to program software, the lighting and shutter speed of a camera, the process of fission—break them down into manageable chunks.
Every complex thing really consists of many simple things. Most readers, when guided through a sequence of simple pieces, can understand those complex wholes.
John McPhee, perhaps the greatest nonfiction writer of our time, almost never uses a word fancier than he needs. To create color and movement, he uses ordinary words precisely. To explain a complex concept, he also uses ordinary words. You can open any McPhee work and pick a random paragraph to see just how well ordinary words work. I did just that with The Curve of Binding Energy, his book about the dangers of nuclear proliferation.
The material that destroyed Hiroshima was uranium-235. Some sixty kilograms of it were in the bomb. The uranium was in metallic form. Sixty kilograms, a hundred and thirty-two pounds, of uranium would be about the size of a football, for the metal is compact—almost twice as dense as lead. As a cube, sixty kilograms would be slightly less than six inches on a side. U-235 is radioactive, but not intensely so. You could hold some in your lap for a month and not suffer any effects. Like any heavy metal, it is poisonous if you eat enough of it. Its critical mass—the point at which it will start a chain reaction until a great deal of energy has been released— varies widely, depending on what surrounds it.
On and on McPhee goes, describing the most complex topics with simple little words. Occasionally he must introduce a technical idea-like U-235, or critical mass—but he always gives us a simple explanation.
Patience allows McPhee to get small words to do big jobs. He understands that the best way to explain something is not to pile on ideas like men in a rugby scrum, but to spread them out like wedding guests in a receiving line. Simple words and sentences, presented one at a time in the right sequence, make it possible to explain even the most complex ideas.
5. Avoid Sardine Writing.
By the time you sit down to write something — a memo, a description, story, an argument — you usually hold several different ideas in your head. Most of these ideas are related, in some way.
But storytelling and explaining requires separating those idea clusters, and parceling out ideas one by one. If you overwhelm the reader with too many ideas at once, the reader won’t have a chance to really see, hear, and feel what you mean.
In general, each paragraph should state and develop just one idea. To discipline yourself, label your paragraphs as you go. Pretend to write headlines for a tabloid like the New York Post or Daily News. Keep your labels short and zippy. Humor helps by getting you to boil the idea to its special meaning.
When you develop one idea at a time, your reader will be able to follow your story, explanation, or argument.
6. Develop Style By Mastering the Basics.
Years ago took a couple of teenagers to a vintage baseball game. Vintage baseball offers an antidote to the modern game. The game is slow and ordered by manners that would please Amy Vanderbilt. But it’s also brisk. Players spend no time strutting or preening. They come to play.
At that game, I met the man whose life has embraced both rebellion and nostalgia. Jim Bouton rocked organized baseball in 1970 when he published Ball Four, an expose of the outrageous and puerile exploits of big-leaguers. But as he aged, Bouton embraced the game’s traditions. Over his life, his style shifted from breaking the rules to honoring the game.
I introduced Bouton to my charges and asked: What’s the best way to develop the best pitching motion?
“Long tossing,” he said.
Long tossing is just what it sounds like—throwing the baseball over long distances, as much as 200 or 250 feet. To throw long, you can’t worry about what you look like. You have to lean back and then rock forward, slinging your arm forward like a slow-moving whip. Most people long-toss the same way, with just small variations for their size and strength. But long tossing offers nothing fancy.
After tossing from the longest distances, you move closer and closer to your partner. When you get to the standard pitching distance—60 feet, 6 inches—you are pitching with your natural style.
And so it goes with writing.
Style in writing comes only after the long tossing of building great sentences, paragraphs, and longer passages. When you do all the little things right, your style slowly emerges. You develop tendencies—toward shorter or longer sentences, greater or lesser use of commas and semicolons, formal or vernacular speech, more or less use of quotations and statistics and other forms of explaining.
As you master the basics, pay attention to the maneuvers of different stylists. When I was first writing for publication—in a small weekly newspaper on Long Island—I idolized Red Smith, a columnist for The New York Times. I also admired Hemingway and Fitzgerald, read biographies, and pushed myself to understand some philosophy. I noted the maneuvers of these writers and occasionally copied them. Which is fine.
Mostly, though, you will discover that your truest style comes from the voice you find mastering the simple tricks and maneuvers of language.
7. Pay Attention To What Does Not Belong.
Architects and sculptors think in terms of solids and voids. An architect, for example, knows that a building’s beauty and utility depends on the space where people move around as much as the structural elements. Architects regularly debate what FAR, or floor-to-area ratio, best accommodates different activities.
Likewise, good writers know that what they leave out matters as much as what they put into a piece of writing.
Ernest Hemingway called this the iceberg method. Make enough information visible–above the surface of the water, metaphorically speaking–so the reader can understand, for themselves, what lies beneath the surface.
Suppose, for example, you want to describe a moment in a great sports event, like the 1969 Super Bowl or 1999 Women’s World Cup championship. You wouldn’t describe everything about the game. You wouldn’t explain the basic rules of the game. You wouldn’t need to introduce readers to superstars like Joe Namath or Brandi Chastain. Instead, you would say only enough to help readers tap into their own knowledge. You might refer to Namath’s brash prediction or Chastain’s sports bra to draw the reader into the story.
The better you know your audience, the more you can draw the readers into the story. When you know (roughly) what the reader knows about a subject, you can leave all but a few cues and reviews out of your account. When the reader gets involved in your story by drawing on her own knowledge, she will pay more attention to what you have to say.
Sometimes, in other words, less is more. You will excite your readers’ imaginations more if you don’t bore them with what they already know.
8. Edit Using the ‘Hide and Seek’ Method.
Your brain is the most powerful—and the laziest—part of your body. The subconscious part of the brain holds a vast storehouse of ideas, feelings, impulses, and automatic systems. The conscious part of the brain manages deliberate decisionmaking. But the conscious mind can only handle one or two or, at most, only three things at a time.
Therefore, when you look for problems—in anything, not just drafts of writing—one at a time. I call it “Hide and Seek.” You need to track down these errors, one by one, rather than trying to catch them all at once.
Don’t try to fix everything, sentence by sentence. Your brain will crash and burn. Instead, look for the common problems of writing, one by one.
1. Start strong: Start by checking if you start every sentence strongly, with a clear statement of who does what.
2. Finish strong: Then see if you end every sentence with a bang—some kind of point, question, or image that propels the reader to the next sentence.
3. One idea per paragraph: Then check your paragraphs. Make sure every paragraph states and develops just one idea. Label the ideas as you go. If you have more than one idea in a paragraph, take it out. Either delete it or use it in another paragraph.
4. Action: Then make sure you use action verbs; avoid “to be” and “to have.”
5. Words: Now look at your other words. Do you use specific words, so the reader can see, hear, and feel what’s happening? Do you limit your use of adjectives and adverbs?
6. Modifiers: Look for sentences that seem to go on forever. Here’s a trick for that: Look for prepositional phrases, which modify nouns. I have seen sentences with a dozen or more prepositional phrases. So what? Here’s what: Every modifier takes you a step away from the action—and adds to the length of the sentence.
7. Punctuation: Finally, get all the punctuation right. Think of punctuation as a form of traffic control. Stop with periods, pause with commas, look ahead with colons, merge with semicolons, warn of uncertain conditions with question marks and exclamation points.
Step by step, attack the problems in your piece. If you just focus on one issue at a time, your brain will veer in on mistakes like a heat-seeking missile. And you won’t get pooped before finishing the job.
9. Read Your Drafts Aloud.
You know how embarrassing it is to hear your voice on a recorder for the first time? You never know what you sound like until you get away from your own head. Hearing a recording makes your sounds — your selection of words, the ways you put them together — objective.
Every time you listen to your writing, you get outside your own tunnel vision and into the world of the reader. Ultimately, the best writers put their reader’s concerns first. As I tell my students, the writer should think of himself as the reader’s servant. The writer should do everything possible to make the reader’s job easier and more enjoyable. If you write clumsily, you put a burden on the reader.
You can set up your computer to read your text back (for PC directions, click here; for Mac instructions, click here). You can also use other online tools, including from Natural Reader, SitePal, AT&T, and Cepstral.
10. Always Serve Your Audience.
I’ve saved the best for last.
Lots of writers write for themselves. They discuss issues, and arrange their words, for their own amusement. That’s OK, I suppose. But …
To become a real writer, serve others. Your ideas and words matter only if you connect with the audience. Don’t show off. Don’t get vague or obscure. Don’t confuse matters. Don’t go on and on. Say something worthwhile, in a way the reader will understand and appreciate.
So who is your audience? That depends, of course. But here’s how to think about it.
Your reader is someone like you—intelligent, caring, alert, open to ideas—but simply has not done the work needed to understand your topic.
Speak plainly to your readers. They are busy and distracted. They need to know what you have to tell them. But they will get frustrated and leave—or just miss your point—if you don’t deliver your ideas clearly and simply.
For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing.